Fashion designer Chen Shao-yen (陳劭彥) avoids the limelight and is a man of few words, making him refreshingly unconventional in the competitive and fame-driven fashion industry. These attributes also make the 29-year-old somewhat difficult to interview.
“What are your feelings about the recent trend of young Taiwanese fashion designers becoming media personalities?” I ask the recent graduate of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
“Ah, different,” murmurs the London-based Chen at a coffee shop in Taipei’s Yongkang Street (永康街) earlier this month.
Photo Courtesy of Tan Chen-chih
And how has technology influenced the presentation of his work and the world of high fashion generally?
“Ah ... yes ... it has,” he says.
Chen’s farouche personality belies an energetic fashion designer of considerable talent. Waver, his Central Saint Martins’ graduation collection, was shown at London Fashion Week in February this year, and Skin, his most recent line, was featured at On/Off London Fashion Week in September. The originality of his designs and his use of unconventional materials led Cathy Edwards, fashion director for the trendsetting AnOther Magazine, to hail Chen as one of the six most promising designers of this year.
Photo Courtesy of Tan Chen-chih
Plaudits like that convinced Chen to remain in London after graduation and start up his own women’s clothing label, Shao Yen (www.shao-yen.com), in September.
Chen first gained international exposure last year with Body as Clothes, a degree project, which took top honors at the prestigious Weekend Le Vif, an international competition held in Brussels, Belgium. Before that, he had interned with some of the biggest names in European haute couture, including Hussein Chalayan, Claire Tough and Alexander McQueen, who died in February.
International celebrities have taken notice as well, including Lady Gaga and Bjork, who donned his designs for photo shoots.
Photo Courtesy of Tan Chen-chih
It is fitting that Chen’s designs would appeal to performers. Born into a family of artists — his mother and uncle are painters and his sister is a dancer — Chen grew up frequenting museums and theaters.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the stage and that’s one of the reasons why I’m interested in fashion. I like the performative aspects — the lighting, stage design, the music, hair and makeup — and how these elements are brought together when presenting a line of clothing,” he says, warming up a little.
Like many designers of his generation, Chen takes the presentation of his fashion one step further with the addition of video technology. “If you know what technology can do, it can give you more options as to how to present your work,” he says.
Chen recently collaborated with Taiwanese artist and architect Yaojen Chuang (莊曜任) on a video to complement Skin. “Chuang’s presentation is quite surreal, which is one of the underlying ideas I had for this fall collection. I thought this would make my idea more complete or stronger and more interesting,” Chen says.
That video followed his own efforts for Waver. Chen shot a video of rippling waves off the coast of Yilan, his hometown, to accentuate the glittering and flowing textures of his collection.
Though Chen believes that video technology will feature prominently in the presentation of his future work, he is quick to point out that it is no substitute for the “laborious process of assembling fabrics and doing a lot of swatches.”
Still, he says technology will play a greater role not only in highlighting his ideas, but also as a part of the catwalk experience. Chen cites McQueen’s hologram projection of Kate Moss at a 2006 show and Chalayan’s laser LED dresses as examples of the ways in which fashion designers are collaborating with tech art professionals. As a result, some fashion shows are as much a multimedia show as they are an opportunity to promote a new clothing line.
“Video technology keeps the presentation of fashion fresh and innovative,” he says.
As projection and hologram technology proliferates, is Chen concerned that store displays and fashion shows might soon become a thing of the past?
“I think that people still want to see the actual work and I would still prefer to have my work sold in a shop. For me it is very important that people try on my clothes [before buying them],” he says.
Chen says that if anything, technology will help him reach a wider audience of fashion-conscious people and companies willing to sell his clothing. It will also free him up to work wherever he wants.
“My ideal would be to be based in Taiwan, but show in London and Paris,” he says.
Does he have plans to collaborate with artists working in more conventional media like painting?
“It’s difficult to collaborate with painters or even sculptors [because] they have very strong ideas of what they want to do and are generally less flexible [than video or tech artists]. There is a danger that their ideas might overwhelm the fashion presented,” he says.
But Chen doesn’t eschew drawing heavily on the work of visual artists. Skin, for example, found its inspiration in the surrealist art movement as well as drawings from 18th-century anatomical books.
“I was interested in how the human body is open and cut — you know skin, muscles and arteries — and examining these different layers and textures. I deconstructed the inside layers so that you can see them on the outside,” he says.
This original approach to fashion design has kept Chen busy with photo shoots and interviews since returning to Taiwan earlier this month.
And though he admits that the talk show circuit and appearances at media events help keep a fashion designer’s name in the news, he’s content to work from behind the scenes.
“I don’t want to be a celebrity,” Chen says. “I want the clothing and its presentation to speak for itself.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist